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The First Twitter Town Hall Meeting

Today marks the very first Twitter town hall meeting. President Obama is participating live from the East Room, further proving that the new information age is favoring social media over traditional news outlets. The meeting between the president and millions of Tweeps raises a lot of interesting questions, one of the best coming from a New York Times blog: “Are the questions posed by Twitter followers — and trending on the social media service — a better representation of what people want to hear from Mr. Obama than those asked by reporters at last week’s news conference?”

While it may seem obvious that questions coming directly from Twitter users are more representative of what the general public is interested in, any forum in which the president is addressing the public is guaranteed to have the appropriate “filters.” The conversation was monitored by Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, and questions were hand-picked by 10 Twitter users from across the nation, all chosen in part by Twitter, says the article. “Those “superusers” will help cull through the thousands of questions to pick the ones put to Mr. Obama. The company will also use its own filters, officials said.” These “superusers” were said to be selected by geographic distribution, helping to identify popular themes and representative questions.

This isn’t the first time a forum has gone interactive online – in April, President Obama met with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to hold a town-hall-style forum with Facebook users, and in January, addressed questions from YouTube users in a forum sponsored by Google. Social media skeptics can no longer deny the pervasive power of online interactive networking.